Thursday Night Open Thread

I don't get why so many people are trashing him for having a child at age 73. He's got more energy than most people half his age and will probably live long enough to see his son go to college or start a band. More power to him. It's so Rock n' Roll.

After her public dust-up with Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway at Harvard University last week, Ms. Palmieri sounds like she's in no mood to be gracious, particularly when it comes to the subject of Trump's empowerment of the white nationalist movement. And neither am I, so speaking for myself only, good for her.

"I know how to be a gracious loser. I could have let it go last week when Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's campaign manager, challenged me to look her in the eye and say she ran a campaign that gave white supremacists a platform. I considered for a split second. I knew you were supposed to be gracious when you come for the post-election forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. But I decided this was a year where normal rules don't apply. Speaking the truth was more important.

"'It did. Kellyanne, it did,' I told her. It's just a fact. Trump winning the election doesn't change that. To my mind, his win makes it all the more important that the truth be acknowledged."

[...]

"I don't know whether the Trump campaign needed to give a platform to white supremacists to win. But the campaign clearly did, and it had the effect of empowering the white-nationalist movement. Trump provided a platform by retweeting white nationalists -- giving their views an audience of millions. Views previously relegated to the darkest corners of the Internet also had a platform on Breitbart, the website of Trump campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon.

"'Before Trump, our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go,' said Richard Spencer, president of a white-nationalist think tank that held a post-election conference in Washington. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said this fall, 'The fact that Donald Trump's doing so well, it proves that I'm winning.'

"It's also true that many of the more than 65 million people who voted for Clinton took Trump's words literally. Many of our supporters were sincerely frightened by his campaign's embrace of the alt-right. Hispanic families who voted for Clinton believe Trump will deport their parents or siblings because he said he would. Muslim supporters fear they will not be welcome in their own country because of Trump's proposed Muslim ban. Mothers and fathers of both parties supported Clinton because they didn't want their children growing up in an America where women and girls don't feel respected by their own president."